At least the Poles make a contribution

One of the few immigration stories not to aggrieve me in the past few months has been the influx of Poles. Some of my best friends are Poles. In my experience, Poles work extremely hard, are keen to assimilate and quickly become full, contributing members of society. How unlike, you might observe, quite a few of us.

Earlier this week, there was a jobs fair in Warsaw, at which top British companies such as Tesco pitched for the services of the next wave of Poles to come to this country. It was not without irony that this took place on the same day that Britain recorded the highest unemployment figures for six years — according to government statistics, 962,000 people are claiming jobless benefits. There are also nearly three million on incapacity benefit, a third of whom, the Government also estimates, are fit to return to some form of work. We heard a couple of weeks ago that anything up to 200,000 people are not working because their brains are addled by drink or drugs. When all that is taken into consideration, it is just as well we have the dear old Poles to keep the country functioning.

I know it is not fashionable to be rude about the welfare state, but this ridiculous situation is entirely down to the fact that we have it. I recall writing about the scandal of incapacity benefit more than a decade ago, and received a letter from a builder aged 32. He had "done his back in" at 27 and was put on incapacity benefit by a sympathetic doctor. Not that he saw it like that: for him, it was "early retirement". At the expense of those who work for a living, he was (as he gleefully said) spending days in front of the telly, sipping chilled beer and watching racing. There was no trace of shame for him in this, because the state had sanctioned his idleness and was happily paying for it. He knew his rights.

Ever since the mid-1990s, successive employment ministers have promised to reform incapacity benefit: but they have failed. To his credit even Dave, who cannot see an applecart without travelling several miles in the opposite direction to avoid upsetting it, spoke this week of getting the disabled back to work. The disabled, though, aren't usually the problem — they seem only too keen to expand their lives by going back into some sort of employment. It is those whom the state has branded incapable, but who are in reality work-shy, who need to be dealt with.

Next week, the Government is expected to announce restrictions on immigration from the next two countries to join the EU, Romania and Bulgaria. Probably the best reason to do this is that it might check the otherwise inexorable rise in the numbers of those who decide in their thirties or forties, or in some cases even earlier, that an injury they have sustained can well serve to prevent their having to work again. If the labour market seems to tighten and mass immigration is no longer available to loosen it, then the Government might, at last, have to persuade some of the indigenous population to get off their backsides and contribute to society again.

Even if we suppose that only a third of those on incapacity benefit are available for work, it still means that, with those on jobless benefit, there are at least two million who could take the jobs that Tesco and others are offering to the Poles. Indeed, given the way the Government fiddles the jobless figures, various bogus training schemes probably mean the number is well north of three million.

While these people are idle, we taxpayers are funding them. We have better things to spend our money on, notably ourselves. And, much as I value the skills and enterprise of our new Polish residents, importing them (or anyone else) must not become a substitute for making our own feckless get back to the grindstone.

Time to stand up to Brown the bully

I know Dave thinks he must be like Labour in order to win an election, but the fact is that, given a choice between a real Labour party and an imitation one, people will tend to vote for the real one. Lord Forsyth's tax commission, which on Thursday recommended policies that would save £21 billion, was not staffed by amateurs. It was comprised of serious people who understand how public finances work, and who had costed how savings could be made. Yet Dave fears committing himself to put money back in the public's pockets.

Given the growing demand for this, he may also be committing himself to losing an election needlessly. It is time he and his spin-doctors stopped being so craven in the face of the bullying Gordon Brown. The way Mr Brown runs the economy is wrong. It is making us unproductive and uncompetitive. When on earth will the Tories be brave enough to break out of their Stockholm syndrome in relation to this man, and actually declare that there is a better way to manage the economy?

Victims of crime are not the criminals

It pains me to criticise the police. The men or women on the beat have a nightmare job, with little political support in fighting crime. Their superiors, too, play the political game, which would explain why many of the letters and e-mails I receive from bobbies often includes a special mention of the appallingness of their chiefs. So I flinched when reading that the rise in street crime, while largely applicable to the drugs menace that the Government does little to counter, is also being blamed by senior policemen on the fact that people have too many Ipods and mobile phones.

If we are going to steep ourselves in a culture where the victims of crime are routinely blamed for it, then there is no knowing where this will stop. I have never been especially enamoured of the judges who tell attractive women in skimpy clothes that they asked to be raped, and equally I don't want to live in a country where someone's fractured skull is the fault of his listening to his Ipod. Instead of this defeatism, can't we catch some drug dealers instead?

Labour's killer blow to public life

The threatened closure of our post offices, like the scandal of the farm payments scheme and the abolition of hunting with hounds, is just another example of our urban Government simply not caring about how life is lived in rural Britain. Its decision to remove, or to connive in the removal of, various services and functions from post offices has driven nail after nail into the coffin of these important businesses. The removal of the television licence sale in July was a notable example of this. Many village stores that have a post office within them survive because they can, in what else they do, compete with the supermarkets on local convenience and quality of service, if not on price. If they lose their post office, many of them will go out of business, the heart will be torn out of many communities and individual people — notably the elderly — will suffer greatly. What a shame they aren't all in towns: then Labour would never let it happen.

Any five-year-old would find this scary

I have had enough of the political posturing of teaching assistant Aishah Azmi, who lost the discrimination case she brought after being told not to wear the veil in class, but who insulted our sense of fair play by netting £1,100 for her "hurt feelings". I cannot see how Mrs Azmi can hope to do her job properly when she turns up in front of a class of five-year-olds dressed like Mrs Grim Reaper. Most five-year-olds would be terrified by the sight of her. Nor did she wear her veil for her interview for her job — in a Cof E school. I want her to be free to practise her faith in our superbly tolerant country. But her employers have a right to expect her to do her job properly, which she can't when veiled. The classroom is no place for politics.

Keep your hands out of our pockets

Former mandarin Sir Hayden Phillips has just published an interim report, compiled at the Government's behest, on party funding. In it, he has hinted that the taxpayer may be called on to give more money to parties, as a means of avoiding the scandals that have led to Scotland Yard mounting a major criminal investigation into cash for peerages. Since only about 60 per cent of those eligible to do so actually vote these days, and a far smaller number than that have the slightest regard for politicians, I cannot imagine there is about to be a public clamour for taxpayers' money to be shovelled into the coffers of political parties. If parties are limited in the money they can raise, then we would at least be spared their mendacious advertising campaigns at every election. Also, they would have to employ far fewer people, which would also mean that more MPs would have to do a proper job before coming into Parliament. A career closeted in the insane village of Whitehall is no preparation for office.

Universal literacy has a lot to arnser for

We should all rejoice in our language, and particularly at the entertainment it affords in having so many words that are pronounced differently from how it seems they should be. The BBC has just issued a new pronouncing dictionary, and I look forward to seeing a copy of it. It is sorely needed. I have been greatly dismayed in recent years at how the BBC regional newscasters in East Anglia mispronounce so many place names in those parts — like no longer saying "Hunston" for "Hunstanton". I even heard someone say "Wymondham" for "Windham", which should be a sacking offence. People started to mispronounce words once they could read: before universal literacy, there was no problem. I do hope the BBC won't go along with this un-historical fad, though we traditionalists have been losing this battle for some years: it must be three decades ago that I heard an announcer refer to the "Daventry" transmitter instead of (as any fule kno) "Daintry". Who will join me in the Campaign for Real Pronunciations?